________WE SAIL VERY CLOSE TO THE WIND_______ to enter your head, Fancy inspecting an avalanche. And to-morrow, I suppose, I shall have to find a bear and take its temperature." With his words we heard the sound of an engine, and almost at once two cars appeared, toiling, on the Spanish side of the pass. They made their way to the frontier, and there they stopped. As their occupants were alighting, a third car arrived from France. . . . Here I may say that before we left two of the cars had gone and another four had arrived. None of them crossed the frontier, and the tourists they brought did no more than stroll to and fro, or make their way to some eminence not too far off. This with an air of disappointment, while some were plainly disgusted to find no line of demarcation running over the hills. I confess I understood their grievance. The verge of two great countries deserves some dignity. I should have felt the better for a second Hadrian's Wall. It was Piers and I that walked over the moor to the Lowland, and, if the journey was hot, we were more than repaid. The road on which Carson was waiting, to the end of which he had come, lay very much lower than ours: we, therefore, descended steadily most of the way and had passed below the tree-line before we rounded a spur to see the car standing below us in a bower which might have survived from Paradise Lost. On one side the moor rose sharply by leaps and bounds: on the other the delicate foliage of beechwoods was masking the grey of a cliff. At the head of the dingle a torrent curled out of hiding to water its length, and the grandeur of the Pic du Midi was piled at its farther end. The spot was ablaze with sunshine, yet seemed most cool: and the vivid green of the natural lawns by the water, the fluting of birds in the beeches, 277